Dean
Once again, the following is courtesy of K (and if you are really ambitious, here is another article on the matter):The full extent and irreversibility of the damage to our country wrought by the Bush administration will likely not be known until well after George Bush finally disappears from our political life. But understanding the dynamics and impulses of the movement which have enabled these abuses is a critically important task, and that is the project undertaken by John Dean’s new best-selling book,
Conservatives Without Conscience (selected excerpt is
here). Fortuitously for Dean, this examination of what has become the so-called "conservative" movement (composed of Bush followers, neoconservatives and hard-core religious conservatives) comes at the perfect time.
With 2 1/2 years still left for this administration, the true radicalism of the administration and its followers has become unavoidably, depressingly clear, and it is equally clear that this movement has not reached anywhere near the peak of its extremism. Dean’s central thesis explains why that is so.
Dean contends, and amply documents, that the "conservative" movement has become, at its core, an authoritarian movement composed of those with a psychological and emotional need to follow a strong authority figure which provides them a sense of moral clarity and a feeling of individual power, the absence of which creates fear and insecurity in the individuals who crave it. By definition, its followers’ devotion to authority and the movement’s own power is supreme, thereby overriding the consciences of its individual members and removing any intellectual and moral limits on what will be justified in defense of their movement.Dean relies on substantial social science data to illustrate the personality type that seeks out authoritarian movements. But his case is made much more persuasively by what one can visibly see unfolding before one’s own eyes.
As Iraq collapses into all-out
civil war and
new, tragic levels of violence, Bush supporters continue to insist that things are going well there and our invasion was a success. As the Middle East spirals into all-out regional war, Bush supporters insist that this repulsive violence is actually good for the region — wars are encouraging "birth pangs" on the road to progress, as the Secretary of State
put it yesterday — and they are now
actively involving the U.S. in this escalated conflict, even while Iraq rapidly falls apart.
And there is seemingly no limit — literally — on the willingness, even eagerness, of Bush supporters to defend and justify even the most morally repugnant abuses — from constantly expanding spying on American citizens, to a President who claims and aggressively exercises the "right" to break the law, to torturing suspects, imprisoning journalists, and turning the United States into the most feared and hated country on the planet.
And as radical as the administration has become, it is clear that the administration has not even come close to reaching the level of extremism which would be necessary for its supporters to object — if such a limit exists at all. If anything, on those exceedingly few occasions over six years when his followers have dissented from the Presidents’s decisions — illegal immigration, Harriet Miers, the Dubai port deal – it has been not because the administration was too radical, extremist, militaristic and uncompromising — but insufficiently so.
Bush supporters want more spying, much more aggressive actions against investigative journalists and even domestic political opposition, more death and violence brought to the Middle East, more wars, and still fewer restraints on the President’s powers, to the extent there are any real limits left. To them, the Bush administration has not been nearly as extremist and aggressive as it ought to be in dealing with the Enemies. And that is to say nothing of the measures that would be urged, and almost certainly imposed, in the event of another terrorist attack on U.S. soil or in the increasingly likely event that our limited war in Iraq expands into the Epic War of Civilizations which so many of them crave.
Ultimately, as Dean convincingly demonstrates, the characteristic which defines the Bush movement, the glue which binds it together and enables and fuels all of the abuses, is the vicious, limitless methods used to attack and demonize the "Enemy," which encompasses anyone — foreign or domestic — threatening to their movement. What defines and motivates this movement are not any political ideas or strategic objectives, but instead, it is the bloodthirsty, ritualistic attacks on the Enemy de jour — the Terrorist, the Communist, the Illegal Immigrant, the Secularist, and most of all, the "Liberal."
What excites, enlivens, and drives Bush followers is the identification of the Enemy followed by swarming, rabid attacks on it. It is a movement that defines itself not by identifiable ideas but by that which it is not. Its foreign policy objectives are identifiable by one overriding goal — destroy and kill the Enemy, potential or suspected enemies, and
everyone nearby. And it increasingly views its domestic goals through the same lens. It is a movement in a permanent state of war, which views all matters, foreign and domestic, only in terms of this permanent war.
Supreme Court justices who rule against the President on national security matters are tyrants, traitors and pro-terrorist. Journalists who uncover legally dubious government conduct carried out in secret are criminals who should be imprisoned for life or hanged. Virtually every political opponent of the administration’s of any significance — Howard Dean, Al Gore, John Kerry, the Clintons — is relentlessly branded as a liar, mentally unstable, corrupt, seditious, and sympathetic to the Enemy.
And even those who devoted much of their adult lives to military service to their country (often in ways far more courageous and impressive than most Bush supporters), or even those who have been longtime Republicans and conservatives, have their characters relentlessly smeared and motives and integrity impugned as soon as they criticize the administration in any way that could embarrass the President — Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neill, the
war critic Generals, Joe Wilson, Scott Ritter, Wesley Clark, John Murtha, John Paul Stevens, and on and on and on.
It is a movement devoted to the destruction of its enemies wherever they might be found. And it finds new ones, in every corner and seemingly on a daily basis, because it must. That is the food which sustains it.
* * * * *In many ways, John Dean is the ideal person to examine this dynamic because he has seen and experienced both sides of it up close and personal. Attracted to the political conservatism of Barry Goldwater, Dean joined the Nixon administration and, at the age of 32, became Nixon’s aggressive White House counsel, deeply involved in helping to perpetrate many of the Watergate abuses. Morton Halperin, who was a standing member of Nixon’s "enemy list," claimed in an
Op-Ed in Friday’s Los Angeles Times that Dean authored a 1971 memo setting forth a plan to "use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies."
But in 1973, Dean became the first high-level Nixon official to turn against the administration, famously testifying before the Senate Watergate Committee that the President (as well as Dean himself) was personally involved in the Watergate cover-up. As a result of his refusal to copy the example of blindly loyal authoritarian followers such as G. Gordon Liddy and Charles Colson — who lied and covered-up for their leader — Dean became one of the most hated enemies of Nixon followers, a hatred which, he later discovered, would make him the target of the right-wing authoritarian tactics which he previously wielded against Nixon’s enemies.
In 1991, as Dean recounts at length, he learned that 60 Minutes and Time Magazine were preparing to feature a new book, entitled Silent Coup, which claimed that Dean himself was the one who ordered the Watergate break-in. The book alleged that Dean’s motive was that his wife, Maureen, had a connection to a Washington, DC call-girl operation and thus had knowledge of various sex scandals involving Democrats, and Dean sought to obtain documentation to use against them.
The very idea that Dean himself had ordered the Watergate break-in because of his wife’s connection to a call-girl service, and that these secrets were somehow kept for 20 years, was completely absurd on its face. And once Dean vehemently denied these allegations, both 60 Minutes and Time investigated the claims and both decided not to run the story — a noble decision which, in Time’s case, led to the loss of the $50,000 it had paid for the rights to run an excerpt of the book.
But using right-wing smear techniques which, back then, were still new, but which are now a staple of the "conservative" movement, these patently false allegations against Dean were aggressively promoted by right-wing ideologues and then accepted and given great attention by the mainstream media. The book’s publishers enlisted both right-wing follower G. Gordon Liddy and by-then-born-again Christian right activist Charles Colson — both of whom still hated Dean for his blasphemy in testifying truthfully against the President — to promote the book and push its allegations against Dean.
More and more right-wing groups and personalities jumped on board this smear campaign, until it received full-fledged support from mainstream right-wing media personalities. That, in turn, induced many mainstream media programs — from Good Morning America to CNN’s Larry King Live — to invite the authors on to discuss the book. Out of this now all-too-familiar process, this defamatory book ended up on the New York Times’ Best Seller List. As Dean recounts:
Despite most of the news media’s fitting dismissal of Silent Coup’s baseless claims, the protracted litigation provided time for the book to gather a following, including an almost cultlike collection of highprofile right-wingers. Among them, for example, is Monica Crowley, a former aide to Richard Nixon after his presidency, and now a conservative personality on MSNBC, cohosting Connected: Coast to Coast with Ron Reagan. Other prominent media-based conservatives who have joined the glee club are James Rosen and Brit Hume of Fox News. How these seemingly intelligent people embraced this false account mystified me, and I wanted to know. . . .
As for Colson, his reason for promotion of Silent Coup remained a complete mystery for me, as did the motives of people like Monica Crowley, James Rosen, Brit Hume, and all the other hard-core conservatives who embraced this spurious history and made it a best seller. The only thing I could see that these people had in common was their conservatism.
That is how the "conservative" movement works to this day, although its methods have become even more efficient and less scrupulous. Petty allegations and character attacks begin percolating in the smear sewers of the right wing — through insinuations by talk-radio dirt-mongerers like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, speculation by Matt Drudge, smear campaigns by shadowy groups and organizations, and now by attention-desperate and glory-seeking right-wing blogs. From there, the attacks are reported by the right-wing media and then fed into the mainstream media.
A lynch mob is created which seeks not the truth of what happened, but the destruction of the movement’s enemies. "Conservative" rank-and-file, confining themselves to an echo chamber, embrace the allegations instinctively, because they are made by the movement’s defenders against the movement’s enemies. And their allegiance to their movement and a desire to destroy their opponents overrides any concern for proportionality or truth. As Dean documents, it is what the contemporary, so-called "conservative" movement feeds on more than anything else — a limitless and bloodthirsty attack on the character of its opponents and enemies.
* * * * *
Dean advances and then amply documents (both with his own analysis and social science data, the former being far more persuasive than the latter) what I consider to be the book’s two central points:
First, that what is currently described as the "conservative movement" bears virtually no resemblance to Goldwater’s conservatism, and has nothing to do with restraining government power or preserving historical values. Instead, it has transformed into an authoritarian movement which largely attracts personality types characterized by a desire and need to submit to and follow authority.
Second, because those who submit to authority necessarily relinquish their own conscience (in favor of serving the conscience of their leader and/or their movement), those who are part of this movement are capable of acts which a healthy and normal conscience ought to preclude. They can use torture, break laws, wage unnecessary wars based on false pretenses, and attempt to destroy the reputation of plainly patriotic and honest Americans — provided that they are convinced that doing so advances the interests of the authority they serve and the movement of which they are a part.
The central premise of Dean’s argument is that the current "conservative" movement shares none of the core principles of the political conservatism which attracted Dean to its movement — those espoused by Dean’s longtime friend, Barry Goldwater (whose 1960 book,
The Conscience of a Conservative, is the source for Dean’s title). That the Bush movement bears no resemblance to traditional conservatism is a view shared by scores of the country’s most prominent conservatives, such as Pat Buchanan and increasingly George Will. The Father of Modern Conservatism, Bill Buckely, just yesterday
pronounced that Bush’s "singular problem" is "the absence of effective conservative ideology." And before his death, Barry Goldwater himself frequently accused the religious right of assaulting core conservative principles.
Relatedly, Dean documents that the "conservative" movement is composed of various factions who actually share very little in common in the way of political beliefs and could not come close to agreeing on a core set of political principles and ideals which define their movement. In the absence of a set of core, shared beliefs, what, then, binds them and maintains their allegiance to this political movement?
The answer Dean provides is the shared hatred of common enemies. And their collective attacks on those enemies have become the consevative movement’s defining attribute. And that is sufficient to maintain allegiance because, argues Dean, what Bush followers crave more than anything else is submission to a powerful authority as a means of alleviating their fears of ambiguity, uncertainty and complexity — the same attributes which are common to all followers of authoritarian movements on both the right and the left:
Given the rather distinct beliefs of the various conservative factions, which have only grown more complex with time, how have conservatives succeeded in coalescing as a political force? The simple answer is through the power of negative thinking, and specifically, the ability to find common enemies. . . .
Important conservative opinion journals, like the National Review and Human Events, see the world as bipolar: conservative versus liberal. Right-wing talk radio could not survive without its endless bloviating about the horrors of liberalism. Trashing liberals is nothing short of a cottage industry for conservative authors. . . .
The exaggerated hostility also apparently satisfies a psychological need for antagonism toward the “out group,” reinforces the self-esteem of the conservative base, and increases solidarity within the ranks.
The heart of [New York University Professor John] Jost and his collaborators’ findings was that people become or remain political conservatives because they have a “heightened psychological need to manage uncertainty and threat.” More specifically, the study established that the various psychological factors associated with political conservatives included (and here I am paraphrasing) fear, intolerance of ambiguity, need for certainty or structure in life, overreaction to threats, and a disposition to dominate others.
This data was collected from conservatives willing to explain their beliefs and have their related psychological dynamics studied through various objective testing techniques. These characteristics, Dr. Jost said, typically cannot be ascribed to liberals.
A healthy skepticism is warranted with regard to the ability of social science data to reveal truths about political movements. But ultimately, the ability of that data to persuade is dependent upon the extent to which it comports with one’s own observations. And when Dean cites and applies the conclusions of the famous study by Stanley Milgram, in which subject participants administered what seemed to be excruciatingly painful electric shock because they were instructed by authority figures in white coats to do so, its applicability to the Bush movement becomes self-evident:
When "a person acting under authority performs actions that seem to violate his standards of conscience, it would not be true to say that he loses his moral sense," Milgram concluded. Rather, that person simply places his moral views aside. His "moral concern shifts to a consideration of how well he is living up to the expectations of the authority figure."
The Bush administration’s ability to engage in extraordinary and radical behavior has not occurred in a vacuum. The administration is radical and can act seemingly without limits because its supporters and followers are radical and limitless in their allegiance to its abuses. Understanding the disturbing and dangerous human dynamic which fuels that movement is critical to understanding the movement itself, and ultimately, to defeating it. Dean’s book is a uniquely valuable tool for understanding what the so-called "conservative" movement has become.
Courtesy of K
I would much prefer to post the link to this blog posting, but alas, I received it via email, sans link. And so I am merely going to reproduce it below and hope that its internal links transfers as well. Marvel at my laziness. Enjoy:2729202, Our dumb presidentPosted by BobcatJH on Tue Jul-18-06 12:32 PM
You know, every time the president's
intelligence comes up for debate, the right wing is quick to tell everyone that, in fact, President Bush isn't an ignorant moron. What's more, not only is he not an ignorant moron, but he's also not an arrogant boor, his behavior on the world stage not a cause for embarrassment. He's a Yale man, after all, with a Harvard MBA to boot! Well today, I'm calling "bullshit" on the right wing. The president is all of those things ... and more.The ignorance, the boorishness, the embarrassing behavior were all on display at this year's G8 Summit, which concluded Monday. Between the president's stuffing a roll in his mouth to his use of "shit" in an exchange with Tony Blair to his witless banter with world leaders to his more-than-awkward surprise "massage" of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, our dumb president has never been dumber or more embarrassing. Or, for that matter, more AWOL when the world needs our leadership most. But that's alright, his defenders will say, he's just being himself, being authentic. Great. Our president is an authentic jackass.It was the "shit" heard 'round the world. In fact, it drew top billing with many news outlets at a time when the world appears to be unravelling as we speak. Bush, who, like Blair, didn't know their conversation was being recorded, called the British prime minister over at the luncheon that closed the summit. "Blair," Bush
asked, "what are you doing? You leaving?" When Blair shifted the conversation to trade negotiations, Bush shifted it back, thanking Blair for a sweater he gave the president as a gift, most likely for his recent birthday. Then, the conversation shifted to the Middle East. After a brief exchange, and while continuing to talk with his mouth full of what appeared to be a roll, the president said, "See, the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it's over."While using profanity and speaking with your mouth full are by no means nothing new - just ask my girlfriend, who could tell you both have been a part of my daily repertoire for years - I'm not the president. I'm not this nation's top ambassador to the rest of the planet. I'm not the public face of the United States of America. I'm just an average American and a blogger. I write things about people ranging from morons like
Brad Stine and
Ann Coulter to role models like
Edward R. Murrow and
Al Gore. I don't have my finger on the nuclear (or the "nucular") trigger. I don't travel in Air Force One, nor do I have a Secret Service detail. And I don't attend summits where I'm expected to, at the bare minimum, act like I've been there before. But Bush is all of these things; I'd just love to be able to dress him up and take him out without him embarrassing himself - or us.So the president said "shit" and couldn't hold a conversation without stuffing his face. We've all done it. But what's as concerning to me, if not more, was the manner by which the president
spoke with his fellow world leaders in an unguarded moment caught on tape. Hint: Like an idiot. When asked by someone, most likely an aide, something about whether or not the president wanted a prepared statement to close the meeting, Bush replied, "No. Just gonna make it up. I'm not going to talk too damn long like the rest of them. Some of these guys talk too long." Then, the president shifted his conversation to, quite likely though the exchange wasn't on camera, Chinese President Hu Jintao. "Gotta go home," Bush said. "Got something to do tonight. Go to the airport, get on the airplane and go home. How about you? Where are you going? Home?" Continuing, Bush added, "This is your neighborhood. It doesn't take you long to get home. How long does it take you to get home?"Though the reply was inaudible, Bush then said, "Eight hours? Me too. Russia's a big country and you're a big country." As the Washington Post indicates, it's at this point that the president apparently brought someone else into the exchange. "It takes him eight hours to fly home," Bush said, telling a server that he wanted a Diet Coke. "It takes him eight hours to fly home. Eight hours. Russia's big and so is China." Russia's big and so is China? Just gonna make it up? Is he, as Cenk Uygur
said, a third grader? Do you feel a lot safer knowing that you voted for a man whose idea of tableside conversation is asking world leaders how long their ride home is and marveling at the size of their countries?When he wasn't showing his grasp of global geography, the president was busy doing things that would normally trigger a workplace sexual harassment workshop. Cameras
captured the president walking behind Merkel and giving her an impromptu shoulder massage. Her look, which mirrors the look of any unsuspecting female in a bar when a drunk gets touchy-feely, was priceless. Bush's look, coincidentally, matched the look of that drunk. I mean, what the fuck? Somehow, I don't see former presidents Bush or Clinton doing this with Helmut Kohl. Nor, also, do I see either Bush or Clinton asking their secretary of state for permission to use the restroom, as this president has
in the past. But a massage? Seriously? I know these summits can be tiring, tedious affairs, but does that fact warrant our president acting like the office letch? I doubt it.Let's face facts: Our president is dumb. He doesn't know what he's talking about. He doesn't know how to act in public. And it's always been that way. It's been more than 70 years since "... the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". More than 40 since "... ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country." And, in that time, we've gone from the measured words of true statesmen to "Russia's big and so is China." Let me be the latest to ask: What the hell happened? When did flipping pancakes, taking hunting trips or throwing a football become more important for our presidential candidates than knowing what the hell they were doing? More specifically, when did we, as Americans, decide that that was what we wanted out of our presidents? I'd sure like to know, because, as I've
said before, "Isn't it a tad insane that we care more about whether we can have a beer with our president than whether we think he can save us from a fucking disaster or actually knows the difference between his asshole and a hole in the ground when it comes to foreign policy?" Who cares if the president would be a great guy to have a drink with? Hell, this one isn't even supposed to have a drink. Or, maybe he's not supposed to but he has, which would go a long way to explaining Bush's behavior at the G8 Summit. Either way, he was an embarrassment. And he always has been.
